Sri Lanka is no stranger to uprisings. Its history is full of instances where people rose against even some powerful kings, and ruthless colonial rulers in the face of brutal repression. Its post-Independence era has also witnessed numerous protests including a crippling hartal, two abortive insurrections, and a protracted separatist war, which was brought to an end 13 years ago. But the recent protest near President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s private residence in Mirihana, and subsequent events, which are still ongoing, could be considered unique in that they have marked a watershed in the country’s political agitations.
Science and technology have turned the world on its head. A few decades ago, in this country, political leaders were dependent on their party propaganda organs such as newspapers/newsletters, the traditional media, and mass rallies for propagating their ideas and shaping public opinion. Up to 1994, when the SLFP-led People’s Alliance (PA) came to power and introduced radical changes to the political and media cultures, only the state-owned television had been allowed to telecast local news! Nobody believed in what the state media said. It was the time when Sri Lankans read the independent newspapers avidly and tuned in to foreign radio services such as BBC or attended public rallies to update themselves on developments on the political front. The most effective tool that helped organize agitations was word of mouth, and the JVP later introduced the political poster as an effective propaganda tool.
Today, we are witnessing a new phenomenon—leaderless protests, which would not have been possible but for social media, which has enabled the ordinary people to network via mobile phones, etc., make common cause and even organize protests. Until recently, this kind of networking had been used for entertainment-related activities such as ‘Facebook parties’. But in other countries, social media has been used to engineer uprisings such as the Arab Spring s in North Africa and the Middle East, and the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest in the US. The siege of the Capitol in Washington by the Trump supporters in January 2021 was also organized via social media.
The ubiquitous smartphone has enabled every member of the public to disseminate news as and when it happens.
Hartal and political protests
The evolution of public protests in Sri Lanka since the 1953 hartal is of interest. What enabled the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) to take on the UNP-government of the day was the discontinuation of the rice subsidy, and steep increases in the prices of rice and other essential commodities. Besides, the people were facing economic hardships of all sorts, which they blamed solely on the government. Their woes, however, pale into insignificance in comparison to what Sri Lankans are undergoing at present.
When the LSSP launched the hartal, only the newspapers and the radio were available in this country, but protests spread like wildfire. The organizers of the massive protest were dependent mostly on word of mouth, rallies and the well-established grassroots network of the LSSP played a pivotal role in the dissemination of anti-government propaganda. The situation became so bad that the Cabinet had to meet on board a warship in the Colombo Port, and Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake had to resign over an incident where police shooting left one of the protesters dead. Protests fizzled out with the passage of time, and the UNP government survived under the leadership of new Prime Minister Sir John Kotalawela.
JRJ’s march to Kandy
Another important political protest in the 1950s was the UNP’s march to Kandy from Colombo in October 1957 against the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam pact. Although it is popularly believed that politics was devoid of violence in the good old days, the protest march came under goon attacks from the very beginning with the police doing precious little to prevent them.
The then SLFP government did everything in its power to prevent the UNP protest from gathering momentum and snowballing into a mass protest movement like the 1953 hartal. Attacks intensified and finally the march ended at Imbulgoda, where thugs led by SLFP MP S. D. Bandaranaike blocked the Colombo-Kandy main road, threatening to shower stones on the protesters if they dared proceed beyond that point. By that time most of the UNP supporters had given up the fight, and J. R. Jayewardene, who led the march, was left with no alternative but to listen to the police and return to Colombo together with others.
SLFP and public resentment (1970-77)
People faced severe hardships from 1970 to 77, under the SLFP-led United Front government but there were no mass protests of the same intensity as the current ones. There were some agitations but demonstrators did not try to force themselves into the residences—private or official—of the Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike or any of her ministers. It is being asked in political circles, why people did not do so despite their economic difficulties. There are several reasons.
There were queues but they were not as long as the ones we see today, and the people could buy essentials albeit not in desired quantities. The economy was closed and not many Sri Lankans travelled overseas or imported goods, and foreign currency restrictions were not felt by the majority of the people. Fuel was not in short supply maybe because there were not so many vehicles in the country at the time. The use of cooking gas was not widespread, and the people mostly used firewood. Most of all, the country was not on the verge of bankruptcy, the local industries were thriving.
Most of all, there were no social media platforms to whip up anti-government sentiments. Some newspapers formed and shaped public opinion and turned it against the SLFP, but not to the extent of making the people surround the PM’s house. The UNP protested and cleverly tapped public anger to achieve its political goal. People used their franchise as an instrument of protest against the SLFP; they reduced it to eight seats at the 1977 general election, and gave the UNP a five-sixths majority. They realized their mistake of giving so much power to the UNP when President Jayewardene began to suppress democracy, act according to his whims and fancies, but it was too late.
Protests after 1977
There were numerous public protests under the UNP governments of Presidents J. R. Jayewardene and Ranasinghe Premadasa from 1977 to 1993, and prominent among the organizers of those agitations was Mahinda Rajapaksa, who now has protesters trying to march on his private and official residences. Those governments pulled out all the stops to crush protests against them; they deployed the police, the military and even their goon squads to set upon their political rivals engaged in agitations, which were organized by political parties in the Opposition including the JVP, which went underground again after being wrongly proscribed after the 1983 ethnic violence.
The worst protest campaign the Jayewardene government had to contend with was the one against the Indo-Lanka Accord and the establishment of the Provincial Councils, in the late 1980s. It was hijacked by the JVP to advance its subversive agenda. Even school children were taken to the streets, and some of them became victims of unbridled anti-terror unleashed by the government. Chaos became the order of the day, but protesters did not try to march on President Jayewardene’s Ward Place residence or the President’s House in Fort.
Divisions of the Sri Lankan society along political party lines remained despite the aforesaid protests, and the UNP supporters did not take part in them unless they were taken out by the JVP at gunpoint. The Opposition supporters hoped for the collapse of the UNP government, but not all of them actively engaged in protests for fear of reprisal.
Mass protests did not end with the retirement of President Jayewardene, and the election of Premadasa and his government. They continued even after the decapitation of the JVP in 1989.
Mahinda and mass protests
Mahinda led the Opposition’s protest campaigns against the Premadasa government from the front. He masterminded mass demonstrations such as Jana Gosha, Pada Yathra and Minis Damwela (Human Chain) in a bid to unsettle the powerful UNP regime, help the SLFP gain some political traction, and, above all, boost his image as a national political figure. Public response to those protests was tremendous, but they remained essentially political and peaceful and focused on engineering a regime change.
Mahinda continued his protest campaign, but the Premadasa government carried on regardless as the UNP was strong electorally. President Premadasa stepped up propaganda attacks on the Opposition, and would make long-winded speeches almost daily, lambasting his opponents and the media outfits that were critical of them. The goons of his government were active and targeted the anti-government critics.
Mahinda succeeded in his endeavor. He made a name for himself as a people’s man and human rights activist. The Premadasa government played into the Opposition’s hands by unleashing violence against protesters. In doing so, it only caused public opinion to turn against it.
But nobody tried to march on the private residence of President Premadasa in Pettah or the President’s House in Fort. This was due to three reasons. The protests were held mostly by the Opposition, which acted within the confines of democratic norms. Also, there were no scarcities of essential goods to drive the people to protest in the streets irrespective of their political affiliations.
Impeachment bid and political tumult
The formation of the DUNF (Democratic United National Front), following the expulsion of a group of UNP stalwarts, including Lalith Athulathmudali, Gamini Dissanayake and G. M. Premachandra, over an abortive attempt to impeach President Premadasa in Sept. 1991, marked a turning point in political protests in Sri Lanka. The UNP dissidents intensified mass agitations, shaking the Premadasa government to its foundations. The DUNF attracted a lot of UNP members and became a political threat to the Premadasa government.
The Premadasa administration had the DUNF protests violently suppressed. Some UNP politicians themselves led attacks on the DUNF protests in areas like Piliyandala. Those strong-arm tactics only made the DUNF more popular and determined. The DUNF emboldened the Opposition to take on President Premadasa as never before. The SLFP capitalized on the situation.
The assassination of Athulathmudali in April 1993 marked the beginning of the end of the Premadasa government. His funeral procession became a mass protest, and mourners clashed with the police and the military at night. The high-profile assassination was blamed on President Premadasa, who could not do anything to convince the public of his innocence. He himself perished in a terrorist bomb attack, a few days later, on 01 May 1993.
The death of Athulathmudali incensed the public beyond measure and a large number of people took part in the SLFP’s May Day rally, and were shouting slogans against President Premadasa. They called him a killer and demanded that he be thrown behind bars. Ironically, they were not aware that President Premadasa was already dead; the government had not officially announced his death, which occurred in an LTTE suicide bomb blast a few hours earlier at Armour Street, Colombo. It would have been a different scenario if social media had been available at the time.
Prime Minister D. B. Wijetunge became President and managed to defuse tension, and facilitate the transfer of power in 1994 after the victory of the SLFP-led People’s Alliance at the 1994 general election, and the presidential election that followed in quick succession.
CBK govt. and protests
It was protests against the UNP government, the culture of political violence and impunity, rampant corruption and the abuse of power that enabled Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, who had come in from the cold, and become the de facto leader of the SLFP, to capture power. One of her main promises was to eliminate corruption and political violence, but the twin evils continued to flourish under her stewardship as well.
The Kumaratunga government emulated its predecessor in handling dissent, and the Opposition protests were crushed and elections rigged. In the run-up to the North-Western Provincial Council election in 1999, the SFLP goons went on a spree of violence to ensure the ruling coalition’s victory. UNP activists were attacked, and some of them were even beaten, stripped naked and paraded in the streets. On the day of the election, Opposition polling agents were chased away, and ballot boxes stuffed by SLFP thugs with the police looking on; the PA scored a massive win. The UNP refused to accept defeat, but to no avail.
What enabled the Kumaratunga to secure a second term was a wave of public sympathy triggered by an attempt by the LTTE on her life on the final day of her presidential election campaign in 1999. The PA won the 2000 general election, and attacks on democracy continued, and in 2011, police brutality resulted in the deaths of two UNP supporters taking part in an anti-government protest in a suburb of Colombo. Protests intensified and the government lost a working majority in the parliament, and collapsed.
The UNP-led UNF, which captured power in the parliament at the 2001 general election became dysfunctional due to a clash between Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and President Kumaratunga. There were protests against the government, which however was not strong enough to unleash violence unlike the previous UNP regimes. Kumaratunga sacked that administration and formed a new government in 2004 with Mahinda as the Prime Minister. The following year Rajapaksa became the President.
Rajapaksa govt. and protests
The Rajapaksa government was busy with the war against the LTTE until 2009, and there were no violent confrontations between the Opposition and the police in the streets. There were protests but it was during the second Rajapaksa administration that the violent suppression of dissent began in earnest.
It became obvious that President Rajapaksa’s commitment to the protection of human rights was only a façade. Pro-government thugs attacked Opposition protests, and they were seen operating alongside the riot police. They openly carried clubs and bicycle chains and set upon UNP activists in full view of journalists. Journalists who were critical of the Rajapaksa administration were hunted down, and the most prominent among them was The Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge, who was assassinated in broad daylight in a Colombo suburb.
Of crackdowns on protests, which were many, two incidents turned public opinion against the Rajapaksa government irreversibly. The first one occurred in 2011. Police brutality left a young protester dead in the Katunayake Free Trade Zone, while holding a demonstration against the Rajapaksa government’s attempt to introduce a private sector pension scheme, which was widely seen as an sinister move to deprive workers of their EPF benefits in the form of lump sum payments, and enable the government to dip into the workers’ superannuation fund. The second one was the military crackdown on a protest at Rathupaswala in 2013, killing two persons.
Rathupaswala and Mirihana
Incumbent President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was the Defence Secretary when the military cracked down on a public protest against groundwater pollution caused by a factory in Rathupaswala. It is being asked why the government under his presidency is acting with some restraint, today. The answer may be that times have changed and circumstances are different. Protests are not confined to one particular area, the military and the police are not equal to the task of containing the protests in all parts of the country, simultaneously, and the economic hardships and scarcities have affected all Sri Lankans, and even the family members of the armed forces and police personnel are among the irate protesters. The police fear for their own safety with so many people out there in the streets. The present government leaders are also in the dock at the UNHRC, and are wary of incurring international opprobrium by resorting to measures that would lead to deaths, and they cannot be unaware that protest could spin out of control, and render the country ungovernable in case of protesters dying at the hands of the police and/or the military.
Possible outcome
Today’s protests are of several kinds: spontaneous (near filling stations, LP gas sales points, and milk powder sales outlets); organized but apolitical like initial protest at Mirihana on 31 March, with even those who have voted for the current government taking part in them, and organized and political like the agitations held by the SJB and the JVP and its offshoot, the Frontline Socialist Party. It is claimed in some quarters that anti-government protests are also a perverse form of entertainment for some young citizens. The government is also having demonstrations held in support of President Rajapaksa, but without much success.
The current situation is far worse than the government thinks it to be. Protests show no signs of abating. The causative factors are far from eliminated, and public anger persists. President Rajapaksa has refused to resign. Only the Cabinet has resigned, and some members of it have already been reappointed. If the government tries to reappoint all the members of the previous Cabinet or is seen to be playing any other trick on the resentful public, having made a tactical retreat, there is bound to be another wave of protest, which is likely to be ceaseless. Hence the need for the government to act sensibly to defuse tension, and redouble its efforts to better its performance, revitalize the economy and do away with the cause of public ire. Most of all, it will have to drop the tainted politicians who have become hate figures, from the next Cabinet. A tall order!
